1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to application development and operation and, more particularly, to resource adapters and the development of applications using an integrated development environment.
2. Description of the Related Art
As a result of the widespread use and development of electronic commerce (e-commerce, whereby transactions for a variety of goods and services are conducted electronically) and electronic business (e-business, whereby business processes, e.g., shipping, procurement, staffing, etc., are transformed so as to be conducted electronically), applications have been, and continue to be, developed to interact with numerous back end systems to access and store information related to an e-business or e-commerce transaction. For example, an e-business application, designed to provide for web based purchasing of goods or services, may need to interact with numerous back end systems to ensure that a good or service purchased is delivered on time to the customer making the purchase. Such a transaction, while apparently simple, may involve numerous back end systems (sometimes referred to as Enterprise Information Systems (ElSs) related to: parts procurement, receiving, manufacturing or Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems, shipping, accounting and many others. Additionally, many of these EISs, often the result of many years of development and storing vast amounts of data, were often not created to interact easily with other systems (i.e., these legacy EISs were often stand alone systems). As a result of this complexity, the development of a single business application which interacts with one or more EISs to provide for one or more e-business services is the effort of much research and development.
To address the complexity in developing a business application, resource adapters have been developed which ease the difficulty for interaction between a business application and an EIS. The resource adapter (also sometimes referred to as a “connector”) acts as an intermediary or broker between an EIS and a business application. A resource adapter architecture generally defines a standard set of services that allow developers to quickly connect and integrate their business applications with virtually any back end enterprise information system. Resource adapters typically are supplied by the developer of the EIS. A resource adapter (or connector) appears as a component (or library) specific to an EIS that provides connectivity to the EIS. It is possible to conceptualize the resource adapter's function as analogous to a Java™ Database Connector (JDBC) driver, which is a programming interface that lets Java applications access data in a relational database. Java is a trademark of Sun Microsystems, Inc.
Without the use of resource adapters, business application developers often do not fully appreciate the complexities involved in leveraging established enterprise applications and end up spending too much time understanding and coding to each particular EIS's integration APIs (if APIs are even available). Then, the hand-coded logic they develop often provides narrow opportunities for reuse, because it is application-specific by design.
However, resource adapters are not without their own problems. Firstly, each resource adapter is typically specific to a single EIS. As such, for “n” number of EISs, “n” resource adapters need to be created. This is often not too problematic in isolation. However, the EIS-specific nature of a resource adapter is coupled with the fact that the resource adapters, which are used at runtime (i.e., during execution of a business application), require adapter tools to be created (typically by the manufacturer or provider of the resource adapter) that are used by an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) to create a business application that can utilize the corresponding resource adapter. As such, a resource adapter is not only specific to the EIS with which it is designed to interact, but the tooling which corresponds to the resource adapter is also specific to an IDE. As a result, if tooling is to be created for “m” number of IDEs, “m” adapter tools will also need to be created. Therefore, for a provider of resource adapter-tool sets to provide resource adapter-tool sets for “n” number of EISs and “m” number of IDEs will require the creation of “m”×“n” resource adapter-tool sets to be created. This is an extremely time consuming and costly undertaking. As such, developers of business applications are typically limited to using an adapter-tool set from the EIS supplier and, possibly, using an IDE that the developer typically does not use as their normal or preferred IDE is not supported by the adapter-tool set.
As such, a resource adapter tooling architecture which addresses some or all of these shortcomings is desired.